Destiny Hayward (right) and other Tindley Accelerated School students listen in class. 'Schools serve as an anchor of excellence in neighborhoods,' Mayor Greg Ballard says.

Written by

Everyone seems to have an idea about how to “fix” the urban core of Indianapolis.

For some, it’s about improving the housing stock and rebuilding basic infrastructure, like sidewalks. For others, it’s about adding bike lanes and better transit. For still others, it’s about putting more police on the streets to curb crime and creating more jobs so people can have a path out of poverty.

Throughout his time in office, Mayor Greg Ballard has had all of these ideas and more. But his latest might be his best — if potentially slowest moving — idea yet.

Schools.

High-performing schools, Ballard says, are the key to stabilizing neighborhoods that have been in steady decline for decades. These are places saddled with violent crime and poverty, and empty houses and buildings left behind by fleeing residents and business owners. The mayor is so convinced that schools — particularly charter schools — are the foundation on which good neighborhoods are built that he is putting them at the center of his redevelopment strategy for at least three neighborhoods.

“Schools serve as an anchor of excellence in neighborhoods,” Ballard said Monday, shortly before cutting the ribbon to Tindley Collegiate Academy, the latest mayor-sponsored charter school to open in the Meadows neighborhood on the Northeastside. “...We are in the process of changing neighborhoods.”

I’m inclined to agree. After all, when you talk to families about why they left Indianapolis for Carmel or Avon or another suburb, they’re likely to mention the school system. Urban living is great until you have to worry about what kind of education your kids will get.

Knowing that you have a high-performing school in your midst does change the value proposition for staying in the urban core. But what it doesn’t do is provide enough of an incentive for families who live elsewhere to move to urban core neighborhoods like the Meadows.

(Page 2 of 2)

It’s like Ballard said: “We need neighborhoods where people want to live, not where people are forced to endure.”

Now, despite the upward trajectory of the Meadows and a handful of other neighborhoods (the Near Eastside comes to mind), the urban core is still largely a place that people “endure.” Those who can leave, by and large, leave. Those who can’t afford to live anywhere else stay.

It’s about quality of life.

Schools are, of course, included in that. But improving schools to improve neighborhoods is a long-term solution to the plethora of quality-of-life problems that are happening now.

This was clear even at the ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday.

Marcus Robinson, founding principal of Tindley Accelerated, started his speech by talking about the Cub Foods grocery store that moved into the Meadows in 1993 to much fanfare and then closed in 1994, leaving the neighborhood a food desert.

The former store became Tindley Accelerated in 2004. Before that, the building sat sad and abandoned — an appropriate representation of the dashed hopes of many residents who had tried so hard to bring a full-service grocery store to the neighborhood only to watch it fail.

Residents of the Meadows are still smarting from that.

Regina Marsh, head of an Eastside community center and a board member of Tindley’s parent organization, EdPower, told the crowd about how many residents get their food from convenience stores and fast food joints.

This is an immediate quality of life issue that opening 20 Tindley schools wouldn’t fix.

In the end, though, I’m convinced that the Meadows, like every neighborhood in the urban core, will benefit from high-performing schools. The results might take awhile for the broader community to notice, but they will happen. They are happening.

You could see an inkling of it Monday, both in the faces of the Tindley students and the adults looking on with pride.

Even if there is no grocery store, decent transit or enough jobs, high-performing schools give struggling neighborhoods hope for the future. The belief that things can — and will — get better, even if it takes a while and even if the present seems overwhelmingly bad.

That might not be the kind of quality of life that people in the suburbs can understand, but it’s one those who in the urban core can fully appreciate.